


lancinante (our minds are troubled by the emptiness)

by iskra (kiira)



Category: Carmilla (Web Series)
Genre: F/F, post-35
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-11-28
Updated: 2014-11-28
Packaged: 2018-02-27 08:35:23
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,096
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2686241
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kiira/pseuds/iskra
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>you trace you fingers over her notes and you mouth the foreign words: you are lost in her all over again</p>
            </blockquote>





	lancinante (our minds are troubled by the emptiness)

Your head hurts. Your head _hurts_ and sometimes you dream of things you have never seen (horrors you have never done) and you wake up and Carmilla is still not there.

(She is rarely there when you wake up in the morning but there is a difference between a breath and a forever; you wonder if she understands your forgiveness; you cry.)

//

It hurt when you killed the dean; an explosion in your head and you remember all at once that you were her and she was you (and that some of her cracked inside you when you pushed that rock over the edge).

That hour of her is lost in your memory and you have watched the video a hundred times (you do not remember touching Carmilla until she flinched and condemning Kirsch to death) but you sometimes feel a cold heartache and _god_ it hurt when you killed her.

//

The week after Carmilla is a fuzzy blur and you think you go to your classes because there are pages of notes in your notebooks but they do not make sense; (you send a text to LaFontaine for the bio notes, and Danny for the Lit notes; you do not read their gentle responses; pity hurts too much to face).

After that first week you stop going to class and you curl into Carmilla’s sheets (they still smell like her) (your shampoo and her perfume and the woods) and read her books.

They are in languages you cannot understand, but the words remind you of Carmilla, Carmilla, Carmilla (you trace you fingers over her notes and you mouth the foreign words: you are lost in her all over again).

//

Her face is bathed in light and she glows (you are reminded of angels; of divinity as she holds the sword in front of her like a mission, like a prayer); it’s childish, but all you want to do is to tell her that you love her, you love her, you love her, but she opens her mouth and  
“I really am starting to hate this heroic vampire crap,” and she’s glowing and sobbing and Ell is in the light; you are crying because you know, you know what she is going to do and _god_ you love her.

She looks at you and you know.

//

Danny stops the camera after you break down; she helps you to your bed (and if you close your eyes you pretend Carmilla is okay; there is a breath between reality that you forget). Kirsch awkwardly tucks you in with his good arm and Danny drapes a blanket over your shoulders.

(“I’m sorry,” she whispered on the walk back, “It’s so goddamn unfair,” and there were tears in her eyes. No one else knew what to say; the silence was something Carmilla would find amusing and Perry squeezed your hand as you gasped for air.)

Natalie and Elsie and Betty have nothing to say; (Betty is a stranger now, a stranger a stranger a stranger).

Somehow Danny finishes your video and she’s happier than you remember ever being and your voice sounds dead to you (Carmilla is _dead_ and it is only fitting).

//

You get incredibly drunk with Kirsch eight days after Carmilla; you forgot somehow, that he lost Sarah Jane and you pass a bottle of incredibly cheap vodka back and forth and he tells you about her and you tell him about Carmilla and you’re both sobbing.

“I’m sorry,” you whisper, and your head is on his lap and he’s clumsily braiding your hair.

“I’m sorry too, Laur,” and you don’t know if he’s apologizing for Carmilla or Sarah Jane or the fact that the two of you aren’t even twenty and have already learned how grief devours.

(You are clinging to childhood and it is being stolen.)

//

Your mother died (car wreck, burned up, you are hazy on the details, you woke up in a hospital three days later).

(Your mother didn’t).

Your mother died and there were months afterwards of tight chest, gasping ragged breaths, pounding heart, and _I think I’m gonna die, I’m gonna die, I’m gonna die._

(You still cannot drive; you pass car wrecks on the road and have to look away, have to press your palms into your eyes until you see stars; it hurt, hurts, will hurt you more than you want to admit.)

But you wake up eleven days after Carmilla and there is the familiar catch of breath and pounding, pounding, pounding; you miss her (you need her) with an ache that _hurts_ ; you can see her falling and you cannot breathe, you cannot feel.

(You are mechanic as you get up from your bed and sweep your arm across your bookshelf and everything falls to the ground; glass and paper and blood, there is something outside of yourself and you throw Carmilla’s glass against the wall.)

(Rage is easier to feel that than the overwhelming sorrow, the all-consuming grief and it’s addictive: the crashing of glass; your mug is next and your hand through the window.)

Perry stumbles in, still half asleep, but she sees the blood on your hand and you are sobbing, sobbing, sobbing and Perry half-opens her mouth as if to say something, but she only breathes out, maybe, “Oh, Laura” and the pity is wet in her eyes.

She gently leads you to her room (you do not deserve gentle, you want rough and maybe it is your fault Carmilla is dead miles below the earth). LaFontaine is awake, and they softly, quietly bandage your hand (and you want to scream, you want them to hate you for you nearly killed them, you _killed_ Carmilla, you _killed_ her).

LaFontaine shakes their head (maybe you said the last part out loud, maybe they know you too well).

“She would have done it anyways, you know,” and you have cried more in these past eleven days than you have since you were ten and motherless, but you look at LaFontaine and break.

//

The next morning you call your dad. You leave out every detail of the supernatural, for you do not know how to explain that the girl you love has seen hundreds of thousands of sunrises, and your voice cannot keep going halfway through the phone call, but he understands, _god_ he understands.

(He asks you if you want him to come get you.)

You want to stay, you explain, you can feel her in this place.

(He asks if there’s going to be a funeral.)

You say there is no body, and you sob.

(He asks no more questions, and comforts you across thousands of miles; you cry for hours and he does not hang up the phone.)

//

You go through her things on the thirteenth day. They’re a mess, and half of her things are yours (it’s fitting; she is yours and you are hers); black heeled boots and leather pants, your yellow t-shirt with cats on it and your pink sundress (you imagine Carmilla wearing it and giggle) (you realize later that you haven’t laughed in nearly two weeks); on the top shelf of her half of the closet is a black sunhat and you wonder if she can go out in the sun (there is so much you do not know, will never know).

Next is her desk, and there is a half finished essay in Russian in her beautiful handwriting on top and you nearly start crying, because now? Now she will never, never, never finish.

(You give it to her professor the next week; she looks at it and then at you and you realize she is crying and then you are crying. “She was very bright,” she says to you, and gently puts the essay into her bag and gives you a soft smile. “I’m sorry for your loss,” and you run before you break down in front of this gentle stranger.)

You do not pack her books (Perry tells you that you won’t get a new roommate – for some reason, applications to Silas are at an all time low); her books are her soul, her complete being and removing them would be a sin.

//

You see Danny kissing Kirsch in the cafeteria fifteen days after Carmilla and you walk back to your dorm and cry, because Kirsch loved Sarah Jane and he kissed Danny and you love Carmilla and your friends grieved with you.

But they’re picking up the broken pieces of their lives and putting them back together and you still wake up screaming, because you cannot dream of anything other than Carmilla diving into the light (did she want to die? It hurts to ask, it hurts but you _do not know_ )

You’re sitting in your bed, reading Carmilla’s copy of L’Étranger for the hundredth time (her notes are in a confusion of English and French and you trace the letters of a language you do not understand) and the door creaks open.

The door creaks open and you do not want to speak to anyone (today was not good, today is not good) but it’s “Hey, cutie,” and your mouth is dry and you will not turn around, you cannot turn around.

“Carmilla?”

Whoever it is make a noise in the doorway and you will yourself to turn and your heart is falling because somehow, somehow, somehow it’s _her_.

She drags herself to your bed and she’s bloody and she’s got a burn on her face that looks incredibly painful but she’s smiling like she could break.

“Yeah,” she says. “Yeah.”

And you pull her to you and you kiss her and she tastes like blood and dirt and finally, finally, _finally_.

“How?” You whisper into her mouth, and she pulls away and looks like the coffin.

“I don’t know,” she says, and her eyes are dark, “but I died. I died and I woke up under the earth and I – I –” She takes a breath and shakes her head (she whispers later into your neck a story about a girl who clawed her way out of the earth and you cry into her hair.)

You pull her to you and kiss her again and again and again and something of grief pulls its way out of your chest because you are crying and she is alive, she is alive, she is oh so alive.

“I broke my hand,” you whisper and show her the cast and she shakes her head.

“I’m sorry.”

“’s not your fault,” because it’s not, it’s not, it’s not (it’s not your fault). She stands (“I have to take a shower, Laur,”) and she’s limping, her leg twisted at a funny angle and you gasp.

“I know,” she says, “it doesn’t hurt, not too much,” and you can’t help yourself because you’re up in an instant, helping her undress and into the shower (you’re still fully dressed but you’re washing her hair).

“It’s my leg,” she murmurs, “not my _arm._ ”

“I know,” and she doesn’t protest again, just leans on you, lets you touch her and whisper comfort into her collarbone, the back of her neck, her shoulders; lets you kiss her cheek and her soaking wet hair like an apology.

//

It broke, you learn, somewhere down there in the pit, and it healed wrong (it won’t ever heal right).

She’ll always walk with a limp (and the doctor gives you a cane) and she shrugs and you kiss her again because you can; (because she’s so damn alive).

//

Slowly, you unpack her things. She laughs when she finds that you packed your things along with hers and you give her a small smile. She hangs her dresses back up and puts on the pink sundress for you and lets you take a photo (you print it and tack it to the wall and Carmilla sticks her tongue out at you) (You kiss her hard).

The hat, you learn, is for summer. She burns easily and doesn’t like sunburns; it’s so damn _human_ that you cry.

She reads to you out loud out of her books and her voice curls around German and Russian and French and Polish (you can feel your grief in the space between letters and sometimes you cry) (she kisses you softly and you remember she is alive, she is alive, she is alive).

//

You fall asleep at night with Carmilla curled up next to you and you wake up every morning with her tangled curls in your face; there is comfort in a breath; in a breath there is a promise of a forever.

**Author's Note:**

> lancinant(e)- qui se manifeste par des élancements aigus  
> throbbing, haunting


End file.
